Faculty & Research
Directory
Torrens Arnal, Marc
Associate Professor, Department of Operations, Innovation and Data Sciences at Esade
URL Associate Professor
Academic Director, Executive Master en Business Analytics
Investigador, ESADE D3 - Institute for Data-Driven Decisions
Education
- Docteur ès sciences en Inteligencia Artificial. École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
- Enginyer en Informàtica. Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
Biography
Marc Torrens is a Computer Science engineer from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia UPC, Barcelona and holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology EPFL, Lausanne.
Marc has published more than 20 papers in international conferences and journals, and is the inventor of more than 20 patents on recommendation and personalization technologies. He also co-chaired the ACM Conference on Recommender systems in 2010 with more than 400 experts from the academy and the industry. He also regularly participates as reviewer in several international conferences on Artificial Intelligence.
His research focusses on how Artificial Intelligence can be applied to solve problems business and people are facing. Marc is convinced AI technology will help humans to overcome some of the challenges we always had and dramatically improve our lives.
Rather than following a traditional academic career, Marc spent more than 20 years creating startups around Artificial Intelligence. He cofounded Strands, Inc. in 2004, an established and recognized global Fintech company working for top tier banks worldwide including Barclays, Deutsche Bank, BBVA, ING, Bank of Montreal, BNP Paribas, Santander, Discount Bank, just to mention a few. From 2004 to 2018, Marc has been working at Strands as Chief Innovation and Product Officer and currently serves the company as member of the Board of Directors. One of the most remarkable achievements of the company was to build a portfolio of 20+ patents around recommendation technology that was acquired by Apple, Inc. His genuine motivation is to bridge the gap between the outputs of scientific research and the inputs needed by real-world AI systems.
Marc is passioned about bringing all his state-of-the-art knowledge in Artificial Intelligence and Entrepreneurship to ESADE to develop brilliant managers, executives and entrepreneurs that transform the world in which we live.
For further information, please visit https://marctorrens.net.
Selected publications
- Bueno, A., Rodriguez-Serrano, J. A., Torrens, M., Agell, N., Nguyen, J. T. V. & Agell, N. (2024, May). Poster: Using Deep Attention Multiple Instance Learning To Improve Malpractices Detection In The Health Sector [Paper presentation]. https://convin.gr/assets/files/misc/IALM2024_Abstract%CE%92ook.pdf
- Torrens, M. (2024). El 'machine learning' en la ciberseguridad. Harvard Deusto Management and Innovation, (61), pp. 28-31.
- Fronte, P., Agell, N., Torrens, M. & Brugarolas, D. (2022). Importance-Performance Analysis in Project Portfolio Management Using an IOWA Operator. In Cortes, A., Grimaldo, F. & Flaminio, T. (Eds.), Artificial Intelligence Research and Development - Proceedings of the 24th International Conference of the Catalan Association for Artificial Intelligence (pp. 45-51). IOS Press BV. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3233/FAIA220312.
- Arriols, E., Demetriou, G., Díaz, R., Durante, C., Moret, V., Ortiz, E., Peña, M. A., Rodriguez, R. J., Stavrou, E., Torrens, M. & Zamora, J. (2022). El gran reto de la ciberseguridad: ¿Está tu empresa protegida?.
- Torrens, M. & Tabakovic, A. (2022). A Banking Platform to Leverage Data Driven Marketing with Machine Learning. Entropy, 24 (3), 347. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/e24030347.
- Almirall, E., Cortés, U., Guerris, M., Ruiz Hontangas, A., Torrens, M., Valogianni, K. & Valor, J. (2020). Los retos éticos de la inteligencia artificial.
- Pardo-Bosch, F. & Torrens, M. (2019). La Inteligencia Artificial para impulsar los Objetivos de Desarrollo Sostenible. Hacia el gobierno digital en México: Conceptos y experiencias (pp. 41-54).
- Nguyen, J., Montserrat-Adell, J., Armisen, A., Torrens, M. & Agell, N. (2019). Measuring rating exigency. In Sabater-Mir, J., Torra, V. & Aguilo, I., Gonzalez-Hidalgo, M. (Eds.), Artificial Intelligence Research and Development - Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference of the Catalan Association for Artificial Intelligence, CCIA 2019 (pp. 256-265). IOS Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3233/FAIA190132.
- Rodríguez, L. & Torrens, M. (2019). Modelos innovadores en banca: Propiciar una disrupción o sufrirla.
- Parra, S. & Torrens, M. (2017). La inteligencia artificial: el camino hacia la ultrainteligencia.
- Torrens, M. (2016). Banking on innovation through data. The FinTech Book (pp. 232-234). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119218906.ch60.
- Martin, F. J., Donaldson, J., Ashenfelter, A., Torrens, M. & Hangartner, R. (2011). The big promise of recommender systems. AI Magazine, 32 (3), pp. 19-27. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1609/aimag.v32i3.2360.
- Amatriain, X., Torrens, M., Resnick, P., Zanker, M., Guy, I. & Jaimes, A. (2010). RecSys'10 - Proceedings of the 4th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems: Foreword. RecSys'10 - Proceedings of the 4th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, pp. iii-iv.
- Holmberg, G. & Torrens, M. (2005, September). MusicStrands: A platform for discovering and exploring music [Paper presentation]. International Computer Music Conference ICMC, Barcelona 2005.
- Holmberg, G. & Torrens, M. (2005, January). Musicstrands<sup>¿</sup>: A platform for discovering and exploring music [Paper presentation]. International Computer Music Conference, ICMC 2005, Barcelona. http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84923878912&partnerID=8YFLogxK
- Arcos, J., Hertzog, P. & Torrens, M. (2004, October). Visualizing and exploring personal music libraries [Paper presentation]. 5th International Conference on Music Information Retrieval ISMIR 2004.
- Pu, P. & Torrens, M. (2004, September). Effective interaction principles for online product search environments [Paper presentation]. ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence, Beijing 2004.
- Faltings, B., Torrens, M. & Pearl, P. U. (2004). Solution generation with qualitative models of preferences. Computational Intelligence, 20 (2), pp. 246-263. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0824-7935.2004.00237.x.
- Hertzog, P. & Torrens, M. (2004, March). Context-aware computing for business traveler care [Paper presentation]. IADIS International Conference on Applied Computing, Lisbon 2004.
- Hertzog, P. & Torrens, M. (2004, January). Context-aware mobile assistants for optimal interaction: A prototype for supporting the business traveler [Paper presentation]. 2004 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces ACM IUI.
- Hertzog, P. & Torrens, M. (2004, January). Context-aware mobile assistants for optimal interaction: A prototype for supporting the business traveler [Paper presentation]. IUI 04: 2004 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, Madeira. http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=18744395492&partnerID=8YFLogxK
- Faltings, B., Pu, P., Torrens, M. & Viappiani, P. (2004, January). Designing example-critiquing interaction [Paper presentation]. IUI 04: 2004 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, Madeira. http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=18744382478&partnerID=8YFLogxK
- Torrens, M., Hertzog, P., Pu, P. & Faltings, B. (2004, January). Towards an intelligent mobile travel assistant [Paper presentation]. Applied Computing 2004 - Proceedings of the 2004 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, Nicosia. http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=2442585662&partnerID=8YFLogxK
- Pu, P., Faltings, B. & Torrens, M. (2004). Effective interaction principles for online product search environments. In Zhong, N., Tirri, H. & Yao, Y., Zhou, L. (Eds.), Proceedings - IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence, WI 2004 (pp. 724-727). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/WI.2004.10058.
- Pu, P. & Torrens, M. (2003, August). User-involved preference elicitation [Paper presentation]. Workshop on Configuration IJCAI, Acapulco de Juárez 2003.
- Faltings, B., Hertzog, P., Samson, L. & Torrens, M. (2003, March). Reality: A scalable intelligent travel planner. Decision support for the business traveler [Paper presentation]. ACM Symposium on Applied Computing SAC, Melbourne 2003.
- Torrens, M., Hertzog, P., Samson, L. & Faltings, B. (2003, January). Reality: A scalable intelligent travel planner [Paper presentation]. Proceedings of the 2003 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, Melbourne, FL. http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=0037661096&partnerID=8YFLogxK
- Torrens, M. (2002, July). Using soft CSPs for approximating pareto-optimal solution sets [Paper presentation]. AAAI Workshop on Preferences in Constraint Satisfaction 2002.
- Torrens, M., Faltings, B. & Pu, P. (2002). SmartClients: Constraint satisfaction as a paradigm for scaleable intelligent information systems. Constraints, 7 (1), pp. 49-69. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1017940426216.
- Faltings, B. & Torrens, M. (2001). Constraint satisfaction for modelling scalable electronic catalogs. Agent mediated electronic commerce (pp. 214-228). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44682-6_12.
- Belakhdar, O., Calisti, M., Macho-Gonzalez, S., Torrens, M. & Willmott, S. (2000, July). CCL: Expressions of choice in agent communication [Paper presentation]. 2000 International Conference on MultiAgent Systems ICMAS.
- Macho-Gonzalez, S. & Torrens, M. (2000, June). A multi-agent recommender system for planning meetings [Paper presentation]. International Conference on Autonomous Agents. Workshop on Agent-based Recommender Systems, Barcelona WARS 2000.
- Willmott, S., Calisti, M., Faltings, B., Macho-Gonzalez, S., Belakhdar, O. & Torrens, M. (2000). CCL. Proceedings - 4th International Conference on MultiAgent Systems, ICMAS 2000 (pp. 325-332). Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/ICMAS.2000.858470.
- Torrens, M. & Weigel, R. (1998, November). Distributing problem solving on the web using constraint technology [Paper presentation]. IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence, Taipei 1998.
- Torrens, M. & Weigel, R. (1998, July). Interchangeability for case adaptation in configuration problems [Paper presentation]. AAAI Workshop on Case-based Reasoning Integrations 1998.
- Torrens, M., Weigel, R. & Faltings, B. (1998). Distributing problem solving on the Web using constraint technology. Proceedings of the International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence, pp. 42-49.
- Torrens, M. & Weigel, R. (1997, July). Java constraint library: Bringing constraints technology on the internet using the java language [Paper presentation]. AAAI Workshop on Constraints and Agents 1997.